Zend Does it Again Part 1

While PHP has definitely become the platform ofchoice for developers who work under Unixlike

operating systems, it has failed to do so under Windows. The reason for this is probably twofold. On one hand, people who go to the extent of purchasing a Windows license may find it more convenient to stick with an all-Microsoft solution. On the other, Windows and most Unix-like environments differ on how they manage processes and threads, and most of the libraries on which PHP is based work with the Unix model, thus causing reentrancy problems on Windows systems, which, in turn, make PHP under ISAPI unstable.

Until now, this meant that, in order to have a properly- working PHP system under Windows, you either had to use the Apache web server, which is not considered stable (at least for production purposes) under Microsoft platforms, or use a CGI solution under Internet Information Services (IIS), which caused the

overall system to perform much worse than a comparable native solution.

While from a technical perspective the lack of a proper Windows solution for PHP developers has been rather downplayed by the community, from a businessstrategy point of view the Windows market is not something that is worth ignoring. For one thing, Windows adoption is significant, particularly in the corporate world where the existence of a large business entity behind a product is seen as an advantage. In addition, companies that have adopted Windows subscribe to a business model that puts a monetary value on software as well as know-how, whereas open-source users are

typically less receptive to the concept of commercial software.

Making PHP a wholly viable choice for the

Windows market, therefore, would open up two interesting possibilities. First, Windows adopters

can take advantage of the lower cost of development and ownership that comes with a PHP solution,

due in part to the powerful language and in part to the relatively lower cost of PHP developers. Second, producers of PHP software gain access to a market whose players are used to having to pay a price for the software they acquire.

It is, therefore, not surprising—although pleasant— that, in late March, Zend Technologies announced the release of their new WinEnabler™ product. WinEnabler works by creating a level of insulation between IIS and the individual PHP processes, thereby protecting the web server from crashes in the PHP executable (which, although very rare, on a multi-threaded system like Windows can bring down the entire server) and, at the

same time, dramatically improving the performance of the interpreter by creating a cached pool of several PHP instances.